Issue 3 - December 2025 - Tanka prose 1
On Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance”
Shifting light suffuses through the next room. I creep tentatively forward through the doorway. A woman (a girl? a crone?) stands in mutable light, streaming through a window, past a lead-tin yellow curtain. I look behind her and start as my eyes grow wide—on the wall is a vision of where I came from. She stands with perfect stillness by the umber table. In her hand is a tiny balance. My lips split as I begin to ask where I am. She brings her left index finger to her lips. I obey and stay silent. She motions to the screen behind her—the scene continues to unfold. She gestures to the table. There is a pile of rich silk. Where the light hits it, it shimmers in the ultramarine of twilight but, in the shadows, it is the charcoal black of space. Next to the silk is a chest full of a bottomless dark. She motions me closer. Across the chest, silk, and table lie what, at first, appear to be silver coins and strings of pearls and chains of gold. I take a few steps closer and the pearls and gold resolve into stars and planets. She points to a pearl in the dark folds of the cloth. Its familiar blues, greens, browns and whites give way to red. I look up to her face. She takes a silver coin which, in her hands becomes the lead white familiarity of the moon and places it on one dish of the balance. Then, she looks at me, motions to the other dish, and speaks for the first and only time, “now you.”
a black vulture
traces a widening gyre
over the Appalachians
the voice of the east wind
deepens into autumn dusk
Joshua St. Claire, USA
Reference work: “Woman Holding a Balance” by Johannes Vermeer. Oil on canvas, 1662-1663. National Museum of Art. Washington, DC.
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